Society drives how we build products, create brands, and design experiences
If a brand is more important than the product, then is the experience more important than the brand? If the products are similar, what makes them unique?
The never-ending debate on whether a brand is more important than the product often boils down to what drives product success: emotional connection or functional quality. However, most of the time, this is not an either-or question as businesses ideally need both to work harmoniously. User experience and service design influence the overall product experience, impacting the product’s success and company image.
An excellent user experience might not be able to save a poor product, but can a stellar brand keep a poor product afloat? Conversely, can a negative brand image make a great product obsolete?
Place, people, and the past
X (Twitter) has been making headlines recently and is witnessing a mass user exodus. 115000 users from the US alone have left the platform since the beginning of November 2024, discussing alternatives such as BlueSky, Threads, and Mastodon. Between November 5 and 15, the usage of the Bluesky app grew by 519% for US-based users. Many users cite bots, AI training models, advertisements, negative interactions, and politics as their main reasons for fleeing or reducing the number of posts on X. Is this due to the product or the brand? Will it likely face a similar fate to MySpace or Google+?
Reed’s Law states that the value of a social network depends on how well it can facilitate the formation of groups and not how well they facilitate connections between individuals. If users can define their own interactions and form groups among shared interests, it can provide a personalized experience. If this is possible on all platforms, what makes a person choose one?
X, Threads, and Mastodon generally offer a similar text-based social media product, but do they offer something new to the user? If not tied to innovation or market demand, will the branding, business decisions, or product experience drive or reduce engagement on these platforms?
Emotional grounding means establishing a connection to a place, people, or past with a product. This connection will likely be even more important in the future, not only for food-related products but also for digital products and services.
The faces of the products we use
Many digital products today have a person attached to the brand, such as Elon Musk on X, Steve Jobs/Tim Cook on Apple, Bill Gates on Microsoft, and Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook. These leaders impact the brand and product image, which can affect the adoption and engagement with the product. Figma, Adobe, LinkedIn, and Vimeo do not have a celebrity-like person attached to them. Do the celebrity CEOs of X, Apple, Microsoft, and Facebook fall under celebrity endorsement strategy or CEO branding?
“There is this inherent tension in advertising between these ideas that celebrities are there to bolster and endorse the product, yet they are also known to take attention away from the product.” — Elizabeth (Zab) Johnson, Wharton Neuroscience Initiative
CEO branding and celebrity endorsement can help a company connect with consumers and build or destroy customer confidence. Confidence comes from the ability to persuade, which is based on evolution and biology about following the lead of a high-status individual. Besides marketing and advertising, how can customers feel confident about a good product from a startup or a company without celebrity CEOs? Does the product or the experience rule over the brand after all?
Bill Gates predicted that “Content is King” in 1996. Is it still true in 2024 and beyond?
In 1996, Bill Gates wrote “Content is King” in an essay about how the Internet and distribution of information and entertainment (content) would become a business opportunity for companies of all sizes.
The way we engage and what we consider as content has changed over the years. It is common today to follow companies and strangers on the Internet for content related or unrelated to the product or person. Something unheard of two decades ago. The means to consume content and the type of content shared also vary by the products we use.
Users browse Reddit to discover content, not because of their branding, but because the usability of the product and content interaction makes it a unique and enjoyable experience. Comments on why users enjoy Reddit over other social media platforms highlight the desire to stay anonymous, discover interesting content, and engage with people sharing similar interests who are not necessarily within their immediate social circle. This brings an interesting question: Is the content king or the queen? Queen refers to the most valuable piece in chess, which alone might have a hard time surviving against a fleet from the opponent.
“The people come to your site because of the content you provide”. This is still a solid statement, although what if the content can be retrieved from multiple sources, such as feeds or TLDR apps? Content exclusivity was more common 20 years ago. In today’s digital age, there are multiple products and means that can provide the same or similar content, so how will the consumer make a decision? The product experience might triumph over the brand after all.
Fear of missing out
The dot-com bubble from the late 1990s saw the rise of many online products and services, driven by the increased global adoption of the Internet and personal computing. Companies without viable business plans jumped aboard with endless IPOs, resulting in a burst in 2000.
In 2012, my washing machine had “AI” written on the surface, but what was the AI? Sensors counting the level of water are not necessarily AI, right? Perhaps it was more about marketing and branding.
Is the current direction with AI-enhanced products looking at repeating the characteristics of the dot-com craze? We witness a plethora of new products utilizing AI come about, but are we reaching a point where the market is starting to become saturated with AI-based solutions? Is it AI for FOMO’s (Fear Of Missing Out) sake, AI for branding’s sake, or AI for improving the product and experience?
Building products and solving problems
Citing the infamous quote attributed to Henry Ford: “If I would have asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” Do customers know what they want? When analyzing insights, does the UX researcher know how to read between the lines to make assumptions about what the user may need?
Henry Ford’s quote provides quite a good reflection on how solving user problems can result in innovation.
Why did Segway’s electronic scooter fail, but lightweight electric scooters thrive? Both products were re-thinking short-distance transportation, but Segway was about technological innovation, and the latter about value innovation. The Segway was loaded with technology and had a hefty price tag of $5,000, all the while being big and heavy, generally too big to use on sidewalks or bring up to offices. On the contrary, reducing the amount of technology and rethinking how the users would use such a product took off 95% of the price, making the product lighter and more compact to charge and move around.
Technological innovation doesn’t necessarily correlate to having a user-friendly product. If Segway was originally produced by Mercedes-Benz, would the brand presence have impacted its adoption? In this case, the product experience rules over the brand.
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards for the technology. You can’t start with the technology and try to figure out where you’re going to try to sell it — Steve Jobs, WWDC 1997
Is AI helping to solve a problem, or is it utilized towards technological innovation to create something new? Both, yet if a user can’t use it to their advantage, is it part of a brand experience, technological innovation, or a product experience?
Video killed the radio star
Will AI take over the designer’s or developer’s jobs? Maybe not take over, but change and enhance. The introduction of development frameworks and content-management systems for example didn’t take over jobs, but it allowed more people to access the technology and build products faster. Technological innovation also creates new jobs and opportunities. Besides prompt engineering, AI will likely generate new jobs as well.
AI can draft a complete design system in seconds. Similarly, WordPress or Webflow can create a site in a few steps. However, the use cases and demands still vary greatly. I’ve often heard the following: “We don’t want the site to look like Wordpress, even if it is built on Wordpress”. This translates into “We don’t want the site to look like all the other sites”. Are we experiencing a similar situation with the current UI design landscape?
In recent years, many digital products look, work, and feel the same. Familiarity makes it easy for the user to understand the product after all and re-inventing the wheel can be costly. This is also where branding has a chance to come into play. Branding is more than just colors and art direction.
I used to have a Honda Civic Hatchback ’88 and then a Volkswagen Polo ’96, while they are a bit different in look and feel, the usability and iconography were still pretty much the same. You operate different cars by pushing the pedals and moving the stick-shift around. Familiar icons make it easy to switch between car models and brands, is it the same with different digital products?
In comparison, I had to learn how to operate a lift truck when working in a factory, and while the appearance was similar, there was no familiar wheel, but a handle you had to turn around with one hand. It took a little time to get used to the change, but afterward, it was easy. When Objectives are different, the experience changes as well.
Products are made in the factory, but brands are created in the mind — Walter Landor
Consumer-facing apps may look, feel, and work the same, but a hospital medical application can be a different experience. The goals and context are different, but in most cases, we are most familiar with the apps that we have easy access to. When a hospital decides on an application or system to use across its facility, will the brand, the product, or the user experience contribute to decision-making?
The visual design we apply reflects our era
Throughout history, art and design have gone through different movements that shaped the look and feel of that time. The Art Nouveau (Jugendstil) movement in the 1890s aimed to break out from the historical styles into a modernized movement for total works of the arts, which was driven by the use of organic or geometric forms, harmony, and natural forms inspired by nature, rejecting excessive ornaments or Victorian-era decorative styles.
“If today’s arts love the machine, technology, and organization, if they aspire to precision and reject anything vague and dreamy, this implies an instinctive repudiation of chaos and a longing to find the form appropriate to our times.” - Oskar Schlemmer
The Bauhaus movement was initiated around 1919 and is infamous for the approach that the function of an object should dictate its form, and re-uniting art and industrial design. Similarly, De Stijl in 1917 focused on simplicity and primary colors. These movements rejected the ideas of decorative styling, paving the way for more functional crafts.
The form should follow function used to be the main idea to break away from the decorative output, but the practitioners themselves started to revert to the decorative styles.
Branding initially started as a way to depict ownership, then evolved into a way to be recognized in the sea of options. Looks, style, and personality have become more important, and branding is not only for companies looking at marketing their products but also personal branding has risen due to the impact of the Internet. Brands also represent values, which can impact if a customer engages with a brand or a product.
Logos and visual identities are elements of branding, which have also changed visually throughout history. Jaguar recently revised their logo to better communicate a step into the electronic vehicle industry. This rebrand has prompted mixed feelings online, but logos also change with visual styles of different eras and industries, as seen with the evolution of the Jaguar Logo from 1922 to 2024.
Have it your way
Will AI drive the future of product design by tailoring experiences to meet the needs and wants of the user, including the design and layout of interface elements and content strategy? This could include anything from font sizes to colors to content length and more. A blank canvas or content cards that will be populated by AI?
Are brands and products becoming like sports teams? Are the products we use a statement of what brands we support or not, or do we use them to solve problems?
Hypothetically, if Mark Zuckerberg were to acquire and become the CEO of Figma, would it impact the way you perceive Figma, or whether you use Figma or not?
Change is driven by business needs and changing consumer habits. Can AI assist in understanding the needs of users? The visual style and actions depict the standards and preferences of our time. Will we revert from minimalist design to more decorative design for the sake of being different, or wanting to elevate the product and brand experience?
What is important? The brand, the product or the experience?
References and further reading
- People are fleeing Elon Musk’s X in Droves. What is Happening on Threads and Bluesky
- People are Fleeing Elon Musk’s X for Threads, and Bluesky. Welcome to the Era of Social Media Fragmentation
- X Sees Largest User Exodus Since Elon Musk Takeover
- Bluesky Tops 20M Users, Narrowing Gap with Instagram Threads
- MySpace — What Went Wrong: “The Site was a Massive Spaghetti-Ball Mess”
- Why Facebook Beat MySpace, and Why MySpace’s Revised Strategy Will Likely Fail
- Five Reasons Why Google+ Died
- The Marketing Psychology Behind Celebrity Endorsements
- CEO Branding Strategies for 2023 and Beyond
- Why We Buy Products Connected to Place, People, and Past
- Content Is King — Original Bill Gates Essay & How It Applies Today
- Why Do You Prefer Reddit Over Other Social Medias?
- The Late 1990s Dot-Com Bubble Implodes in 2000
- The Psychology Behind FOMO (Fear of Missing Out)
- Segway Case Study: Avoiding the Fate of Electric Scooter
- Prompt Engineering
- Art Nouveau Movement
- Bauhaus Movement
- The Bauhaus, 1919-1933
- De Stijl
- Oskar Schlemmer
- History of Branding
- Fearless. Exuberant. Compelling. This is Jaguar, Reimagined
- Evolution of the Jaguar Logo
